Looking at Test Scores a Little Less Testily; In Mayor's School System, the Buck Stops Here. So Does the Blame Game.

This summer, as New Yorkers watched soccer, sipped Frappuccinos and lamented their fate in sweltering subway stations, the Bloomberg administration was busy making profound changes to the administration of the city's public school system.

In the last two months, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg wrested control of the system after more than 30 years of decentralization, signed a contract with the city's teachers, and began to move the Board of Education -- now known as the Department of Education -- into the Tweed Courthouse. Just last week, he appointed the first chancellor to oversee this new structure, choosing a former federal prosecutor, rather than an educator, to lead it.

But for all the political capital, ideological debates and behind-the-scenes maneuvering that went into creating these changes, how much of them will be even remotely apparent next month, when the classroom doors close and the process of schooling 1.1 million children begins?

Aides to Mr. Bloomberg describe what they are trying to do to the system as evolution, rather than revolution, and urge patience with things that matter most to parents, like test scores, classroom overcrowding and substandard instruction that leave many children without basic skills.

Mr. Bloomberg and his new chancellor, Joel I. Klein, have been, by and large, silent about the larger education questions of the day, like what type of math or reading curriculums should be adopted or how bilingual education should be approached.

They expect some marginal, cosmetic improvements to fall into place sooner. For example, broken windows, which often took months to fix, should now be repaired quickly, thanks to a streamlining in the way schools are maintained.

More significant, perhaps, is a tonal change that has been strongly sought by city officials, teachers, principals and superintendents.

By ending, in one fell swoop, the battles between City Hall and the Board of Education, and the popular urban parlor game ''Blame the Teachers (or the Principals or the Board of Ed)'' for the failure of public education in New York, Mayor Bloomberg -- who says he will take the blame for any failures going forward -- clearly hopes to free up prodigious amounts of energy, intelligence and talent that can be trained on the myriad problems in the classrooms.

Now that the Department of Education is one of the mayor's agencies, rather than a whipping post, parents may be moved to think that their schools are working better right away, if for no other reason than that City Hall will stop telling them how awful they are. Mr. Bloomberg has already changed his tune; last week he said for the first time that New York's schools were better than those of other large cities, and that test scores are not the only measure of quality.

''If the system works well, then the benefits flow to the classroom,'' said Frank J. Macchiarola, who was New York's schools chancellor from 1978 to 1983. ''But the people can't draw the connection. It is like asking me if the generator at Con Ed is working because I am getting electricity.''

Mr. Macchiarola, now president of St. Francis College in Brooklyn, added: ''What a parent should see in a school is order in the room, that the kids come back after a couple of days with assignments to do and a positive sense of what is going on. It is very hard to get parents to agree with the prevailing overwhelming view of schools because their view is shaped by teachers they know.''

In many ways, the most significant move toward that goal was not the changes in school governance, but the new teachers' contracts, in which salaries grew by 16 to 22 percent in exchange for a slightly longer school day.

How the additional time is used has not been decided; some of it will be used for professional development, the rest for teaching.

But the pay increase immediately resulted in a 50 percent increase in the number of teachers who are either certified or will be certified this year. The contract also increased the maximum yearly salary the city can pay teachers hired from other school districts to nearly $61,000 from $43,370, which has also led to an influx of what the city says are more experienced teachers.

To bring about many other changes he is seeking, Mayor Bloomberg will almost certainly have to extract additional union concessions, like allowing principals more power to assign teachers to specific classrooms, and eliminating seniority as the determining factor in assigning teachers to various schools.

And under the new centralized system, the dynamics of contract negotiations have shifted. Before, the board, the chancellor, the city's labor relations unit and the United Federation of Teachers all played some role in the process.

The city's major goal was to save money, which the union used to extract work rule changes. But now that work rules can have an onerous impact on things that the mayor is now accountable for, the contract negotiations will likely resemble those with other municipal unions.

Mr. Bloomberg can no longer repeat the rhetoric of previous mayors, who loved to say that increasing the education budget was like throwing money down a black hole. He will have to seriously consider calls from his chancellor for more resources, and to weigh in on how they are used.

One of the biggest changes to the school administration is its headquarters. Last spring, Mayor Bloomberg announced that he would move roughly 600 employees from the Board of Education building in downtown Brooklyn to the Tweed Courthouse, next door to City Hall. The move was in part symbolic -- the mayor stressed that it showed how close the two parts of government would work.

Among those making the move are the superintendents of community school boards, which the mayor has suggested shows both their importance in the new administration and the need to keep tabs on them as part of the new accountability. But others wonder if that takes the concept of centralization a bit too far.

''Now, when it looks likely community school boards have less of a role to play,'' said Arthur Greenberg, a former superintendent in Queens, ''the presence of superintendents in the community would be even more crucial.''

But the superintendents' move into Tweed also underscores the fact that the chancellor will be paying close attention to exactly what every person in the Department of Education is doing, and in many cases, will significantly alter their roles.

Some may find their jobs eliminated. Others may take on new responsibilities. Some officials point to, for instance, a lack of middle managers overseeing areas like high schools, which has created a leadership gap.

''There was no sense of going through a process of monumental legal and structural change, and getting them through the legislature and governor, and not looking at making similar structural changes in the way people do their jobs,'' said the mayor's communications director, William Cunningham. ''The chancellor will look at and question a lot of things.''

With the death of the Board of Education, an advisory panel with no real authority will give advice to the chancellor on educational issues. Mr. Klein will report directly to Mr. Bloomberg, just like the police and fire commissioners; Deputy Mayor Dennis M. Walcott will still serve, when needed, as a liaison between City Hall and the Department of Education.

''We will be right behind each other, having fun playing stickball between the two buildings,'' Mr. Walcott said.

Although Mr. Klein did not mention it in his acceptance speech, one headache he inherits is the School Construction Authority, which the chancellor now directs. The reputation of the agency, which is responsible for building schools, has been strikingly tarnished in recent years because of its huge cost overruns -- which have left it far short of the money needed to build all the schools that were planned -- and faulty construction that has left many new school buildings in need of extensive repairs.

The authority was also constantly at war with the Board of Education's school facilities unit, which is responsible for maintaining schools. In the last year, Mr. Klein's predecessor as chancellor, Harold O. Levy, made strides in merging the functions of the two entities, a process that Mr. Klein is expected to continue.

''If the process continues,'' said Howard Wilson, the departing chairman of the School Construction Authority, who hopes that it will, ''ultimately one person will be in charge of everything and everyone will report to him.''

Several government officials predict that the department will also shed many of its noneducational responsibilities that have claimed the times and attention of chancellors over the last few decades. Just as the Police Department does not concern itself with ordering guns but using them, the Department of Education may lose some of its control over purchasing, personnel and other functions, like running the buses.

Of course, no one expects the school system's students to be aware that the chancellor no longer has to worry about buying pencils, answering to a politicized board or dealing with a school construction agency over which he has no authority.

But Bloomberg administration officials insist, take away those worries from a chancellor, and those students will benefit the same way they benefit from parents who are able to turn away from the static annoyances of life and focus exclusively on them. Teachers, they insist, will take their cues from the chancellor.

''There will always be drama in the local school, because teachers have a tremendous drain on their time,'' Mr. Walcott said. ''Our job to make sure we put a system in place that eliminates distractions like crime, broken windows, and distractions from forces that may be outside of the realm of teaching. Putting better accountability in place allows teachers to concentrate on being teachers.''